


The Stars in Your Ocean

by gouguruheddo



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-11
Updated: 2016-10-11
Packaged: 2018-08-21 20:29:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8259589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gouguruheddo/pseuds/gouguruheddo
Summary: Eren and Armin talk about their fears and their hopes.





	

Time was slipping. It was a folding thing, stacking and layering on each other in such thin pieces you could see the future through the past. Hours, minutes, seconds… They were nothing when it all ended the same. It always ended the same.

The stars were out, because that’s what they do. The leaves were changing, because that’s what they do. The air was cold and heavy with the smell of burning wood, because that’s what it does. Eren was outside, lost in his mind, because that’s what he did. He felt like that’s all he did now.

He used to know how long ago Shingashina was. It felt like three autumns ago. It might have been five. He remembered watching as Mikasa got taller, their scarf seeming to shrink around her wider shoulders, fraying bits of wool appearing after every training session--after every battle. He had caught her sewing a piece of it back together one day, fingers that were never meant to do household chores were pricked, and he remembered how the red of her blood matched the red of the fabric. He shuddered.

They’d worked so hard, and he often wondered for what. Armin had grown so strong. So smart. He had a voice that could command his own protection. Gone was the boy that took fists to the gut in the alleyway. The amount of lives he saved with his mind surpassed some of those that took to arms with their snapblades. If there was going to be a history to look back on, Eren knew that Arlert would be a name that future cadets would learn. They would aspire to be him.

And what about Eren Yeager?

Yes. What  _ about _ him?

“Eren.” The voice was soft. Familiar. Careful in all the right ways to not startle him. “What are you doing out here? It’s after curfew.”

Eren raised his head. There was a lingering silence, and the other boy knew it was because Eren had to find the words that wouldn’t hold a bite. It had been hard for him to fake politeness. Even addressing higher command was becoming a chore. “I know, Armin.”

Armin sat down the bucket he was carrying in front of him. He must have just returned from the well, presumably to stock up his dorm with necessary drinking and bathing water. He rubbed his forearm across his forehead, his stiff denim jacket mussing up the blond strands of hair that threatened to cover his eyes. Armin wasn’t about to argue with Eren as it was a battle he was going to lose. “Doesn’t answer why you’re out here.”  


Eren looked down at him, and he saw the sky looking back up at him. Even in the glow of the camp’s torches, Armin’s eyes were vast sprawling sheets of turquoise. “Thinking.”

“Mmm.” Armin mumbled, his arms crossing in front of his chest. His breath escaped in wisps of chilly smoke. His cheeks and the tip of his nose were pinched red from the cool air. “You’ve been doing that a lot lately.”

“Have I?” Eren asked, genuinely curious.

Armin averted his gaze, focusing on something in the dim distance. His expression was soft, but the tension in his eyebrows was clear. “Yes. Truthfully, I notice you’re out after curfew a lot these days.”

“You never tell on me?” There was a hit of jovialness in Eren’s tone, or at least he hoped there was.

“I should.”

A twitch of a smile tugged at the corner of Eren’s lips. He bent down and picked up the bucket with both hands and heaved it up to his hip. “Then we should be on our way.” Eren started to shuffle forward, but he didn’t hear footsteps following him. Instead, he noticed, they were moving away. He turned to see where Armin had gone, and caught the boy swaying his body against the wooden side of the armory building. Sliding his back against the wall, he landed on the ground with a slight huff, his head hanging behind a curtain of fiery gold. “Armin…”

“I’ve been thinking too,” Armin admitted. He looked up at Eren, and Eren thought he must look this small when he was titan shifting. All those years, and maybe he never actually grew at all.

“You’re always thinking,” Eren said. And he wasn’t wrong.

“They said it was blue.” Armin’s fingers tangled within themselves. The toes of his boots pointed toward each other as his head shook. “They said it was so blue that you couldn’t tell the sky from the water.”

Eren lowered the water pail and let it hang at his side with one hand. He was quiet for awhile. Armin was quiet for awhile. He could hear the flicker of a nearby torch, and a door slamming somewhere in one of the dorms. They were quiet a bit longer before he said, “Yeah.”

“Sometimes it could be a dark blue, so dark it looked black. Other times it could be green like jade. It would shine and shimmer brighter than any jewel.”

Eren placed down the bucket at Armin’s feet and took a heavy seat next to his friend. His head lulled to the side as he watched Armin recount his father’s books, like he had thousands of times before. “Does it?”

“It does.”

On the edge of the wall there was nothing but stars. They used to draw constellations with their fingers, and wonder how much those tiny balls of light had seen of the world. “Do you think it looks like that?” Eren pointed with his chin at the bucket of water. It was dark, but the white speckles of stars shimmered across the surface.

“Better than that.” Armin said, with so much certainty that it came out like a command. “They said the water is always moving.” He tapped his boot against the rim of the bucket, the water sloshed over and onto the dirt below. It rolled in on itself, like a mobius, causing waves that seemed to go forever. The moon peeked in the corner of the reflection, its edges distorted and morphing in the wake of the ripples. “The moon pulls at all the water and causes waves as big as titans.”

“Really?”

“Really.” Armin’s head hung lazily toward Eren. They were so close, Eren’s breath teased the hair on top of his head, and he let himself let out a long sigh. “I’m tired, Eren.”

“Me too. We should get back.”

“I mean…” Armin’s hand dropped to his side, and his fingers dug shallow designs into the dirt. “I’m  _ tired _ .”

Eren didn’t know what to say. He never knew what to say anymore. He was thinking a lot lately. Some of it, he remembered, was how to answer this sentiment. They were all so  _ tired _ . Every death they saw they grew a decade older. By this point, they were old enough to be gods. Some days they wished their immortality would end--they had seen enough.

“Eren, I see you sometimes.” Armin started, his hand lifting as he let dirt fall between his fingers. “I see you in that titan’s mouth. I see you disappear in its mouth, and I remember my own voice coming so loud that it deafens me. I know they’re dreams…”

“We’re here.”

“Everytime you change, Eren, what if…”

“We’re  _ here _ .”

“We ask you to change.  _ I _ ask you to change. But what if you…”

“Armin.” Eren said sharply. He felt something. His heart was full of so much anger and rage that he had pushed out all other useless feelings--feelings that did nothing but serve to get in the way of his purpose. But Armin and Mikasa held a special sliver at the bottom of his heart. It used to hold more people: his father, his mother, some childhood friends he had since forgotten the names of… There wasn’t any more room. Some would call it love, and at some point in time, he would have called it that too. He wasn’t sure if it  _ was _ that anymore, or if it was just a corrupted form of it. Revenge and hate forged into a shield he used to protect them, because he felt like he had to. Because if he didn’t have them, he had nothing to fight for. They were his resolve. His power. If they were still here, he’d be able to Kill. Every. Last. One.

“I can’t watch you die again, Eren. I think about it every day, and I think every day about it happening again.” Armin’s voice was wavering. He was always the first to cry as kids, and he had gotten so much better at destroying his emotions lately like Eren… But it was there. Eren could hear the tears before he saw them drop on the ground next to Armin’s twitching hand.

“We all are going to die, Armin.”

“Of course we will. Don’t insult me.”

“I mean…”

“I’m not asking you to solve anything.” Armin looked up where eyes of sky and ocean met. “I just wanted you to know. You and Mikasa… You’re all I have.”

Eren frowned. “It’s more than what a lot of other people have.”

“Eren!” Armin was angry now. Angry because he knew Eren was right. Angry because he knew that Eren and Mikasa were good friends to have when you asked your friends do the impossible: survive. “Just listen to me…”

He did it without thinking. Eren took Armin’s hand in his own and lifted it into the dull camp light. His fingers laced between Armin’s and he turned it in the light in front of his face, studying it like he had never seen it before. The index and middle finger were heavily calloused after years of blisters bursting and forming and bursting again against the triggers of his snap blades. Small white cuts peppered his skin, some from mishandling of new blades, some from training sessions that didn’t go in his favor. His nails were uneven and cut well below the tips of his fingers, yet week old dirt still managed to cake under them.

So fragile looking and small, Armin still looked more combat ready than Eren. Eren’s titan powers ate away any bit of imperfection on his skin. Gone were the days when his hands were the hard ones against Armin’s. Not even splinters held fast in his skin nowadays. He really was the closest thing to being immortal. There was an unsettling amount of times he died and was reborn in blood that evaporated from his skin... He wondered when he would start wishing for the cycle to end, and for the blood to stick heavily to his skin and weigh him down to sleep.

“I am listening, and I’m saying that we’re here.”

Armin’s lips parted, and his eyes were wide. It was pointless to argue with Eren. He would lose. Squeezing his fingers closed around Eren’s, he nodded a shallow nod. “They said it smelled like seaweed and salt. I don’t know what the smells like, so I always imagined it smelled like your mother’s cabbage stew.”

“I miss her cabbage stew.”

Armin smiled weakly. Eren looked at him. The bottoms of his round eyes were shallow with too many nights of restless sleep. His nose was slightly upturned, pink with cold and sniffles from his brief lapse into tears. His lips were pale, so pale they nearly matched his skin, and cracked from licking them so much from nerves. The bottom lip was split in the middle, not from a cruel fist from a bully, but from being snapped by a tree branch while 3D maneuvering.

Eren wondered when he had started to see Armin as nothing but a ghost. A man turned into a memory so that when the inevitable happened, it wouldn’t hurt as much. The titan boy caught himself licking his own lips, and he saw Armin’s head slowly bobbing out of focus. Looking up, he caught Armin’s eyes in a soft confession of consent, and he knew what it meant.

It was rare for Armin to be wrong, and this was not one of those times. They did only have each other. And Eren knew that the sliver that weighed at the bottom of his heart was still love, and that sometimes he might be able to feel it boil and bubble to the top during the right times. During the times that it was safe to, because if he never let it rumble he would never have a chance to feel it… And the next time they leave, the risked not ever coming back.

Eren pressed his lips to Armin’s, and it was a clumsy and ugly thing. Stiff and puckered, just like how they pictured in the stories Armin used to read them when they were kids. It softened after an extended time, when their lips went soft and their teeth clanked against each other. Armin was the first to let out a chuckle, then Eren. They pressed their foreheads together and felt each other’s smiles against the other. Eren pressed to remember a time they had both felt like this. It was hard to think of a time.

“We’ll see it someday.” Eren promised the promise he had always said. “Together. All three of us. As long as the ocean exists, so do we.”

Armin squeezed his hand and looked at the bucket of water they had both neglected. “If it was anybody else, I wouldn’t believe them.”

“If it was for anybody else, I wouldn’t care.”  



End file.
